Elsewhere, Nhat Hanh himself clearly indicates that engagement (here a nonviolent struggle or action) is a natural impulse (that, by implication, could not be anything new or unique to the modern era):

The essence of nonviolence is love. Out of love and the willingness to act selflessly, strategies, tactics, and techniques for a nonviolent struggle arise naturally. (1996: 57)
You cannot prefabricate techniques of nonviolent action and put them into a book for people to use. That would be naive. If you are alert and creative, you will know what to do and what not to do. The basic requisite is that you have the essence, the substance of nonviolence and compassion in yourself. Then everything you do will be in the direction of nonviolence. (1996: 62)

The Thai “reformer” Sivaraksa (Buddhadasa’s protégé) echoes this contention about the nature or essence of Buddhism:

Religion means deep commitment, and personal transformation. To be of help we must become more selfless and less selfish. To do this, we have to take more and more moral responsibility in society. This is the essence of religion, from ancient times right up to the present. (1988: 12)

If “moral responsibility in society” has been the very “essence” of Buddhism “from ancient times right up to the present,” then it goes without saying that social engagement could be nothing new in Buddhism—that “good” Buddhists, at least, have always been socially engaged.

In an interview with Christopher Queen, Bernie Glassman Rōshi gives us a Zen echo to Nhat Hanh and Sivaraksa’s sentiments. Glassman asks rhetorically, “How did [the Buddha] benefit mankind by sitting in meditation?” He answers his own question:

This is a problem with the term ‘engaged Buddhism’ in a broad sense. … Anything one is doing to make themselves whole in their own life, or realizing the Way, or becoming enlightened—whatever term you would use—these are all involved in service, because if we realize the oneness of life, then each person is serving every other person and is reducing suffering. (Glassman, as quoted by Queen, 2000: 104)

And later in the same interview he comments:

I still feel—maybe it’s wrong—that if you keep on practicing, even in the cave, there is no way of not working on social issues, only the method might be different. … Social action is established now [in Buddhism in America]. It was always amazing to me how people could think it wasn’t an element of Buddhism, but I don’t hear that anymore. (Glassman, as quoted by Queen, 2000: 122)(9)

Paula Green reports on Kato Shonin, instrumental in developing Nichidatsu Fujii’s Nipponzan Myohoji order of Nichiren Buddhism in America:

In reflecting on Buddhism and social engagement, Kato Shonin believes that since the Buddha turned the Wheel of Dharma on this earth, this earth is where we obtain his teachings and reach enlightenment. … If individuals practice the Lotus Sutra correctly, Kato Shonin says, “life itself is engagement and we do not need to separate into engaged and not-engaged Buddhism.[…]” Every moment of life is engagement; every moment of life is Buddhist. (2000: 153-154)

Stephen Batchelor—well-trained as a Buddhist monk in both the Tibetan and Korean traditions—also invokes an “engaged essence” in Buddhism in a personal communication to Sandra Bell in 1997:

Leaving aside language of engagement—or its opposite—Buddhist practice, in essence, is one in which a person tries to seek and balance … wisdom … with compassion. … Traditionally these have been seen as the two wings of a bird. … [A] tension between insight and understanding on the one hand and a compassionate response to the world on the other … is a classic tension. If one starts from there the whole notion of making an issue out of engagement becomes superfluous. (Batchelor, as quoted by Bell, 2000: 413)

Historically ancient origins

Most (if not all) traditionists make arguments similar to the above in their writings.(10) If the very essence of Buddhism includes social responsibility and engagement, then that essence must be clearly evidenced throughout Buddhism’s history. The great Sinhalese scholar Walpola Rahula wrote a whole book (The Heritage of the Bhikkhu) defending this very point. Christopher Queen tells us:

“Buddhism is based on service to others,” wrote Walpola Rahula … in 1946. … Rahula … argued on historical grounds that political and social engagement was the “heritage of the bhikkhu” and the essence of Buddhism. (1996: 14)

In an anthology dedicated to socially engaged Buddhism, The Path of Compassion (ed. Eppsteiner, 1988), Joanna Macy reveals her own surprise at discovering that traditional Sri Lankan monks found an “engaged Buddhism” to be nothing new: